Performing respectability: Thai femininity and the haunting figure of the prostitute

Dr Jin Haritaworn

Feminist theorists have problematized simple dichotomies of female sexual subjecthood v. objectification, and the role which the capitalist media play in shaping and constraining the discursive field within which young female-assigned people negotiate ownership to their bodies and sexualities. This is further complicated for those whose exclusion from sexual agency occurs at a more categorical level, where to be sexual means to be always already prostituted, abjected. For many diasporic Southeast-Asians, to enter into sexuality paradoxically means to leave the realm of desire and the desirable. The figure of the ‘Thai woman’ in particular is desirable only from a pathological position; a voiceless object to be bought, sold and ‘trafficked’ between white and brown men (as well as the patriarchal subaltern family). For the ‘female’ Southeast Asian subject, therefore, sexual agency occurs in a specific discursive realm, which calls for different engagements, resistances and subversions. These include by necessity not only the state, market and media, but also western feminism itself, with its material and ideological investment in the ‘trafficked victim’, and its historic complicities in the objectification, patronage and ‘protection’ of female subaltern bodies and sexualities.

This talk attempts to map this discursive realm from a transnational entry point of Thai ‘mixed race’ and second generationality. Drawing on interviews with people in Britain and Germany who were raised in ‘mixed’ Thai/‘interracial’ families, Dr Haritaworn argues that racism threads itself through the sexual and gender negotiations of those who grew up under the sign of ‘prostitution’, largely in the absence of alternative repertoires. If these negotiations are constrained by a white, heteronormative lens which automatically re-assigns the female-assigned Thai diasporic subject to the realms of ‘the victim’ and ‘the prostitute’ (a misrecognition which also pervades western feminist and queer scholarship), the question of sexual agency, for Thai as well as other female and sexual subalterns, is nevertheless not one we can afford to dismiss.

Bio

Jin Haritaworn is Fellow in Transnational Gender Studies at the Gender Institute at the LSE. Jin’s work crosses borders of sociology, cultural studies, gender, sexuality and critical race studies. Research interests include sexual citizenship and the militarization of intimacy in the ‘war on terror’, and changing representations of ‘mixed race’ and multiculturalism. A monograph on Thai multiracialities in Britain and Germany is forthcoming with Ashgate.

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network and the Centre for Gender Studies (SOAS)

Contact email: N.S.Al-Ali@soas.ac.uk